HSC Workshop Series

When you hear the terms, “The Terrible Twos” or “Adolescence” most of us can conjure up visuals, behaviors, needs, or challenges associated with human beings in those phases of life. For decades researchers have studied humans as they grow and mature through various stages of development and have created benchmarks and expectations of everything from behaviors to needs for each stage. What if I told you that nonprofit organizations similarly grow and evolve through predictable stages or lifecycles? And, that each of these stages also have benchmarks and expectations of behaviors and needs! This is known as the Nonprofit Lifecycles Model and once we know it we can use it as a powerful tool to make informed and strategic decisions to maximize the success of our organizations.

Join us for a workshop that will provide a clear overview of the 7 Nonprofit Lifecycles including the unique characteristics, needs, and challenges of each. Participants will have the opportunity to explore real life examples of how each stage can show up in an organization, engage with the Lifecycles Model as a tool for organizational evaluation and “diagnosis” of needs & opportunities, as well as reflect on how this model could be leveraged within their current organization.

This workshop is excellent for all nonprofit leaders and board members but we specifically welcome those in a period of transition as understanding your organizational life stage can provide the framework for growth during change.

About the Presenter
Kristi Taylor is the Director of Leadership Development & Consulting Services at the Human Services Coalition of Tompkins County. Kristi brings over 15 years of professional experience working in the non-profit community with a specific focus in domestic violence and sexual assault victim service organizations. During her work, she has had the opportunity to advocate for survivors as they sought safety and healing through formal systems as well as during psycho-educational and peer support groups. Additionally, Kristi provides empowerment based self defense courses to those who live and identify as women, girls, and the LGBTQ+ community. Kristi is a skilled and knowledgeable trainer on the topics of abuse, trauma, and prevention strategies; who is passionate about improving community responses and safety for all. By bringing together her various work experiences and insights, Kristi provides high quality, knowledgeable, empathetic, and engaging learning environments for participants.

This event is in-person only and will not be recorded.

Masks are optional at in-person events.

All registration sales are final.

“Radical” might sound dramatic – but when it comes to accountability – it’s actually the most important thing to be defined. Radical generally refers to something that is fundamental, extreme, or goes straight to the root of a matter. Most leaders can describe what “amazing” looks like. Almost none can tell you what the floor is — the actual, non-negotiable minimum that has to be true before anything else matters. That gap is where accountability goes to die, and where good employees start guessing at what “doing my best” even means.

This isn’t about writing SMART goals. Using BEE Strategies’ signature BUILD‑ENGAGE‑EXECUTE approach, you’ll build a standard you actually wrote yourself — one made to stick, not to land in the recycle bin next week. Bring a real accountability challenge or employee issue you’re wrestling with; we’ll work through it live.

You’ll walk out with:

• The Radical Minimum Standard Worksheet — draft the real floor for your team or role in about 20 minutes flat
• The Standard-Setting Conversation Guide — turn your draft into a standard your team helped build, not one you handed down
• The Accountability Check-In Tool — a five-minute recurring habit that makes “we said we would” actually mean something

About the Presenter
Deborah Mohlenhoff is a public-sector executive, leadership educator, and team-development strategist with 30 years of experience spanning city government, higher education, and nonprofit leadership. She is the founder of BEE Strategies Consulting, where she helps municipal governments and nonprofits build highly functional teams and effective leaders. She most recently served as the founding City Manager for the City of Ithaca, New York, and previously as Chief of Staff to the Mayor and a 12-year elected member of the Ithaca Common Council — giving her a rare, firsthand view of both the staff and governance sides of local government. A certified Gallup CliftonStrengths facilitator, Deborah has designed and led strategic planning retreats, leadership development programs, and organizational assessments for municipalities, colleges, and nonprofits across New York State, including 12 years as Program Director of Leadership Tompkins. Her work is grounded in the BEE Collective, the leadership framework she developed to help organizations build a strong foundation, engage across complex relationships, and execute on a shared mission — turning individual leaders into truly high-functioning teams. Learn more at beestrategiesconsulting.com.

This event is in-person only and will not be recorded.

Masks are optional at in-person events.

All registration sales are final.

Nonprofits today are being asked to do the impossible: hold steady through funding volatility, generational leadership handoffs, and a rapidly shifting cultural and political landscape — all while staying true to the mission that got them here. It’s tempting to treat storytelling as a communications function, something reserved for the annual report or the year-end appeal. But story is also one of the most underused strategic tools an organization has for navigating change from the inside out.

Through this workshop, participants will learn how to:

• Utilize storytelling as a diagnostic tool to surface which organizational practices and norms still serve the mission — and which were built for a different era
• Tell their own story of leadership in relation to their organization, developing a clearer understanding of how and why they lead — and what that means for leading through this particular moment of transition
• Facilitate a storytelling process to build community and help people and teams sift through the disorientation of transition together
• Translate that internal narrative work into external storytelling that humanizes the organization for funders, board members, and the community — helping people see not just what the work is, but who it’s for

Participants leave with a practical framework for facilitating this work inside their own organizations, plus tools adaptable for both internal culture-building and external communications and fundraising.

About the Presenter
Dr. Laura Colket is the founder of Whole Human Leadership. In this capacity, she supports leaders to bring more somatic awareness, mindfulness, creativity, play and joy into their personal and professional lives so they can lead from a place of authentic connection and alignment rather than disconnection and burnout. Through somatic coaching, leadership cohorts, workshops and consulting, she helps people become the best versions of themselves so that they, their communities, and their organizations can thrive.

Dr. Colket is an experienced educator and leader with 20+ years of experience in the education and nonprofit sectors, and holds a doctorate in Educational Leadership and a master’s in Intercultural Communication, both from the University of Pennsylvania. She has lived and worked in Grenada, Haiti, Morocco and Thailand. She has expertise in program design, curriculum development, faculty development, organizational research, human-centered AI integration, global education, constructive dialogue, policy development, storytelling, teambuilding, somatic awareness and leadership development.

Her edited volume, ‘Becoming: Transformative Storytelling for Education’s Future’, is a collection of powerful stories about teaching, learning and leadership. It provides a framework for readers to reflect on (and tell) their own stories, in order to fuel personal, professional, and organizational transformation. Her latest book (in progress) provides a ‘leaders as healers’ framework, focusing on creating more humanizing workplace cultures. She is also creating a healing-centered leadership card deck, to support nervous system regulation alongside creative and purposeful leadership development.

This event is in-person only and will not be recorded.

Masks are optional at in-person events.

All registration sales are final.

Intended for Executive Directors, Senior Leaders, or other high level leaders in significant decision making roles of not-for-profit or governmental organizations.

Staff, board members, or volunteers, are welcome to attend the evening session.

Are you and your staff exhausted, overwhelmed, feeling like you have lost the guiding force of your values when it comes to serving the community? If so, you are not alone! Human service leaders and staff are facing increased pressures to make impossible choices, are unable to serve the most vulnerable in our community due to imposed policies and funding, or “playing nice” with systems that are harming the communities you serve. Many describe the impacts they are experiencing as burnout when in reality the underlying cause may actually be Moral Injury.

“Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.” (The Moral Injury Project)

Join this leadership specific orienting session to When the Work Hurts. This session is designed to facilitate leaders through creating structural supports for managing and responding to moral injuries as people and as those responsible for others. Silence, blame, or ignoring the conditions causing moral injury does not stop or heal it. However, building an action-oriented, values-driven community does. Come ready to learn, to share, and practice replicable actions that put us in closer connection and commitment to one another for the long haul.

About the Presenter:
Johnanna Ganz, Ph.D., (name/they) is a systems-thinking, data-focused pragmatist who looks for opportunities to turn theory and ideas into action. As the founder of J. Ganz Consulting, LLC, Johnanna’s passion lies in increasing the sustainability of mission-driven agencies and their people through skills-based education and coaching. In their doctoral research, Johnanna studied occupational and organizational identity development in victim advocates and their agencies using quantitative and qualitative approaches. Since then, Johnanna has used this research to develop tools and trainings to work in deep collaboration with mission-driven staff and leaders as they build their knowledge and skills around sustainable occupational identity management and practices of liberatory organizational cultures. Johnanna approaches every project and relationship with the philosophy of, “Let’s do better, together.”

Dr. Ganz has served in a variety of mission-driven roles, particularly focused on ending gendered violence in local, state, territory, and national communities. Some of Johnanna’s prior roles include adjunct professor of Sociology and Women’s/Gender Studies, Domestic Violence Victim Advocate, Sexual Assault Response Team Leader, 3 Systems Change Program Manager, Rural Projects Coordinator for a national training and technical assistance provider, and the Sexual Violence Justice Institute Director. Johnanna has also had the privilege of serving as a grant reviewer for the Office on Violence Against Women (2020-2024), an adjunct faculty of Hamline University in the Social Change and Social Justice Department (Fall 2022), a member of the Board of Directors for the Minnesota Alliance on Crime (2021-2022), and the Advocacy Policy Subcommittee Chair for the National Taskforce on Advocate Wellness (2023-present).

Light morning refreshments will be on offer and lunch will be provided – choose your sandwich option while paying for your registration. Lunch is a box including a medium sandwich, chips, a bottle of water, and a cookie.

This event is in-person only.

Masks are optional at in-person events.

Any requests for needed accommodations to fully participate must be made by 10/12/26.

All registration sales are final.

Thank you to the Health Foundation of Western & Central NY and to the Park Foundation in Ithaca for their financial support allowing us to provide this critical program with minimal cost to those in our community.

This opportunity is offered as part of the IMPACT Capacity Building Program of HSC.